Gender is odd sometimes. I have known for a very long time that I am not female, no matter how many people told me otherwise. I knew I wasn’t male either, but for a long time I didn’t have the words to explain who or what I am. In ways I still don’t, nonbinary is an umbrella term for all of us who don’t fit into the gender binary.
I often find people get a little bit confused when I say I am nonbinary because they expect someone thin and androgynous with a crew cut and a beige wardrobe and it’s fine to be that but that is not who I am. I wear skirts and dresses and I describe myself as femme, because I look and dress in ways that are associated with femininity. Sometimes people find that hard to understand, and that’s ok, you don’t have to understand you just have to respect. There’s an Eddie Izzard quote I’ve liked for years that about nails my relationship with cloth, “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes I bought them”, to me that’s a perfect explanation. Clothes don’t really have gender, we often associate them with gender, but they don’t inherently have that.

As long as you respect my identity, and use the correct pronouns (they /them) and tittle (Mxtress) then that is all that really matters to me, if you want to understand then that’s even better, allow me to point you at some resources and articles about gender and how it’s more wibbly wobbly that we’ve been lead to believe, but as long as I am shown my due respect, then that is what matters to me.

This one is a few years old now, and I’d suggest you look up the updated version that delves into how the scientific understanding of biological sex has changed in recent years, this is still a pretty solid introduction though.

I find often that parts of the scene are not built with nonbinary people in mind, which can be incredibly frustrating – it’s not like we’re a new concept, people who are not part of the binary have always existed – but more and more I am starting to see people cotton on.
Sometimes I encounter odd little things though, I signed up to Smuttyfy recently (feel free to send me a friend request!) and was very happy to see there was an “other” option in the flip down menu for gender during sign up, but then found it pretty odd that my newsfeed said things like “Mxtressvalleycat updated his profile picture”, it seems a little odd to me to default to he/him pronouns when they/them exists (or an even better option that always fills me with good feelings for a site is a write in option or a flip down for pronouns!).

People who insist on using she/her pronouns for me or calling me a woman even after I have explained otherwise will not get far with me, if you cannot even show me the basic respect of getting that right, how am I supposed to think of you in any way as someone who could be a good submissive?
If you have done this in the past, but want to apologise you can do so here by paying my $100 missgendering fee.